CSBG Archive

Lorendiac’s Lists: The Comic Book Fan’s Bill of Rights (First Draft)

I wrote most of this a few months ago, after I had stumbled across a blog entry at http://www.engel-cox.org/textvision/a_funny_book_bill_of_rights.html in which Glen Engel-Cox posted his own criticisms of a work called “Comic Book Reader’s Bill of Rights Version 1.0.” If I’m reading things correctly, the original was written by a guy named Marc Mason for his own blog.

I agreed with most of Engel-Cox’s criticisms of Mason’s version, so I decided to try writing down my own version, starting from scratch, instead of just rewriting Mason’s ideas point by point. In an attempt to make it easier to distinguish between Mason’s effort (from January 2004) and my own take on the same general concept, I carefully substituted “Fan’s” for “Reader’s” in my title.

To save you a little trouble: Let me assure you there’s no need to sadly inform me that I’m indulging in shameless wish fulfillment here, and that it is highly unlikely that the “reforms” my Bill of Rights seems to call for will happen at any of the big American comic book publishers in the foreseeable future. Believe me, I knew all that before I ever started typing! But a fan can dream, can’t he?

The Comic Book Fan’s Bill of Rights (First Draft)

1. You have the right to expect that a one-year subscription to that exciting monthly title, Character X, will mean that you receive twelve consecutive chapters of coherent storytelling about the adventures of Character X and his supporting cast. As opposed to having #’s 1-3 be a three-part arc, followed by #4 being “Part 6 of the X-Cruciatingly X-Tended X-Ploitation Crossover” that stretches across seven other titles, followed by #5 being “Part 14 of the X-Cruciatingly X-Tended X-Ploitation Crossover,” followed by #6 being “Part 22 of the “X-Cruciatingly X-Tended X-Ploitation Crossover,” followed by #7 showing the hero reeling from the aftermath of the “dramatic events” that happened in the grand finale of that Crossover (“Part 24″ which naturally was published in another title) . . . you get the idea.

02. You have the right to expect that once The Powers That Be have established a good solid origin story for a superhero, they’ll basically leave it alone. Sure, doing regular “retellings” with rewritten dialogue and “expanded details” is one thing, but throwing out the essential points on the spur of the moment for the sake of getting “shock value” from something “new and different” is something else, and should be off limits! The Powers That Be should remember that wise old
adage: “If it ain’t broke . . . don’t fix it!”

03. You have the right to log in to online forums and proceed to gripe, whine, bellyache, sob, and otherwise rant and rave regarding anything remotely connected to the comic book industry, criticizing any point on any basis you see fit, regardless of whether or not other participants on that forum think your rantings and ravings actually make any sense whatsoever!

(Please note: The unpleasant corollary to this is that all the other fans participating on the same forum have an equal right to loudly express wild opinions, even if you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that their ideas don’t make any sense! It’s amazing how many fans insist totally overlook this corollary to the concept of “free speech.”)

04. You have the right to expect that when an ongoing series is collected in TPBs, whatever issues of that series are reprinted will be reprinted in order, so that the internal continuity, with its gradual development of long-term subplots, etc., actually makes sense to anyone reading the TPBs as they are successively released. For instance, the fourth TPB collection will only contain issues that were originally published after the ones reprinted in the third TPB collection of the same series.

05. You have the right to expect that when a company publishes #1 of a six-part miniseries, or the first installment of a six-part story arc within a well-established ongoing series, that the next five issues have already been scripted and pencilled so that you won’t find this putatively “monthly” story being delayed for months at a time between issues.

06. You have the right to expect that the dialogue in the original issues of a story arc will remain the same in the later collected editions — hardcover and/or softcover — instead of being rewritten on the fly so that people who wait for the book get a remarkably different idea of what “really happened” in that story than you did when you were faithfully subsidizing the project by buying each skinny little issue when it was hot off the presses.

07. You have the right to expect any necessary retcons in the continuity of a particular title — or in a large universe of many related titles — to be clearly and unambiguously announced so that you will know beyond a shadow of a doubt whether or not the shocking events of Team Y #400 (published eleven years ago) are still a valid portion of the relevant characters’ history today.

08. You have the right to expect the publishing company to insist that any Hollywood writer who expects to be paid for a script for a movie or TV episode based on your favorite superhero (or superheroes) will at least take the time to read a few years’ worth of the relevant continuity before he actually writes the script. (You similarly have the right to expect the director of the whole shebang to do the same thing, so that he has some basis for judging how “faithful” the first draft is to whatever the “most essential elements” of the original concept are, in the director’s informed opinion.)

09. You have the right to be warned of the following Fundamental Rule of Public Statements by Professionals: Whenever an editor, writer, artist, or other “insider” at any comic book company makes a firm statement such as “This character is dead, dead, DEAD, and will stay that way!” or “That controversial story arc from ten years ago has been retconned away into limbo and will never be heard from again,” any such statement implicitly includes the following escape clause, even though no one bothers to spell it out when he is handing out “definitive sound bites” for journalistic use:

“And this statement is absolutely positively guaranteed to remain valid until such time as someone important at our company has another mood swing and decides to throw this guarantee out the window in favor of making a quick buck by putting things back the way they were before! And that’s a promise!”

Understanding this crucial point about the “Automatic-But-Unspoken Escape Clause” can save you from an awful lot of heartburn over the years, as your favorite “moments of resolution” from one title or another get shamelessly rearranged — Dramatic Weddings turn into Dramatic Divorces, Tearjerking Moments of Heroic Death get watered down by having the “martyred” hero make a cheerful return from the grave, Permanent Loss of Superpowers turns out to have been Very Temporary Loss of Superpowers, A Veteran Hero Utterly Disgracing Himself turns out to have been A Veteran Hero Being Totally Mind-Controlled by Someone Else (And Only a Spoilsport Would Still Hold It Against Him) . . . you get the idea.

10. You have the right to receive fair warning that the people who actually produce these comic books don’t care what “rights” you think you have. If they want to announce a new “monthly” series and then release two issues a year, they’ll do it. If they want to have the third TPB collection from a title reprint #’s 17-20, 22-23, and 25, and then follow this up with the innovative tactic of having the fourth TPB collection from the same title reprint #’s 15-16, 21, and 26-28, they’ll do it. If they want to act as if they have “very quietly” retconned away the huge stinking embarrassment of Team Y #400, without ever finding the courage to stand up in public and admit, for the record, that a retcon-erasure is exactly what they have done, they’ll do it. Et cetera. They are probably wrong to do these things, but that never stopped them before and it certainly won’t stop them now!

P.S. Try to find solace in the thought that, as described in #03, you still have the right to log on to your favorite forum and complain long and loud about the disgraceful behavior of certain professionals. I mean, just imagine how quiet and boring all the comic book-themed forums would get if The Powers That Be at the various comic book publishers didn’t keep providing us with fresh material for well-justified complaints, week after week and year after year! Why, in a worst-case scenario, this entire rant (thinly disguised asa Bill of Rights) might never have been written, because instead of brooding about bad behavior, I would have been too busy gleefully perusing the dozens of consistently well-written, coherently-plotted, respectful-of-basic-continuity stories that the big publishers were continuing to churn out each month about all my favorite characters! (And we wouldn’t want that, would we?)

28 Comments

avengers63

DUDE! You started out great, but in the last few, it just went to hell. Up through #8 (with the possible exception of #7 – it’s iffy), these are totally reasonable and desirable. After that, it seems that you drifted further and further into snark & sarcasm. Good thing this is a first draft.

Jeff Holland

mikesensei

Well ranted. There should be a corallary to number 6 (or number 4?) regarding changes to material when its collected in a TP:

“If you buy all of a miniseries in its original installments, you have the right to expect that you do indeed have all of the story. A trade collection of the miniseries can and probably should included added enticements along with the miniseries itself, such as behind-the-scenes articles, previously unseen script and art pages, etc. What it should not include is a new chapter to the story, so that the only way to get the *complete* story is to buy the trade.”

Let this be called the “Kingdom Come” addendum. The epilogue added to the trade, where it’s revealed that Clark and Diana are expecting, and want Bruce to be the godfather, is a much more satisfying ending to the story than what we got in the original release. It was also intregal to the plot of the “The Kingdom” miniseries that followed a few years later. It wasn’t “an extra”; it was integral.

1. You have the right to expect that a one-year subscription to that exciting monthly title, Character X, will mean that you receive twelve consecutive chapters of coherent storytelling about the adventures of Character X and his supporting cast. As opposed to

… having one of those issues just not show up, and then when you try to call the subscription people to arrange a replacement copy, nobody answers the phone. And if you do get through to someone, you should have the right to have them actually send you a replacement copy, promptly, and not tell you that you’ll get a replacement copy in six to eight weeks and then not actually send one to you.

Maybe it’s just me.

Freeform2

Yeah, I feel so strongly about #1… I remember back in the 90s, my little brothers loved Spider-man and were following Amazing Spider-man in particular… So for my brother’s birthday, I bought them a subscription to Amazing Spider-man.

The previous year was filled with the kind of basic Spider-man stories that make kids love comics… a little angst, a lot of action, a few plot twists… and finished in 1-3 issues… I figured I’d be buying my bros a year of this sort of thing they love.

Then Maximum Carnage happened. Two months into their subscription… The rest of their subscription was unreadable.

You know, come to think of it, Maximum Carnage would fit right into the pointless and over-extended mega cross overs that are now all the rage.

Scott

I have a problem with #2. “Changing the origin is off-limits”. For the most part that sounds good. But then Swamp Thing comes to mind. Once Alan Moore got his hands on the character it added a lot of much needed depth to him.

At first SWAMPY was a man changed into a Plant Thing.

Alan Moore made it so that the plant life the character died on absorbed his memorys and personallity, only thinking it used to be a man. When it found out it was just a walking plant with the deceased mans memorys it opened up lots of future storys.

I think Alan Moore’s revision of Swamp Thing’s origin would fall into the “expanded with extra information” category. As I recall the issues, there’s no one moment in the story that outright contradicts the original origin, Moore just casts it into a very different (and more interesting) context.

Anyway, I particularly enjoy #3, #9, and #10, and wish holier-than-thou types on forums would remember this. I’m really quite tired of seeing people post viciously condescending screeds whenever fans on a forum (intended for the expression of ideas) dare to express ideas they personally find negative or undesirable.

Disagreeing would be fine, but instead you frequently see people who think they’re smart telling other people they find dumb to shut up, that they don’t deserve to talk about comics on their internets. Right now I’d consider this one of the worst facets of online comics fandom.

Doug Atkinson

#2 doesn’t just apply to Swamp Thing, though (and Moore’s retelling of the origin was presented as a shocking new development at the time, not just a minor new detail; point #2 as written wouldn’t allow it, let alone all the Parliament of Trees/the Green stuff. Or Frank Miller’s Daredevil, for that matter). Were Jay Garrick, Alan Scott, Carter Hall and Al Pratt “broke”? No. Is DC’s publishing history immesurably richer and better because they published “fixed” versions of them with not just new origins but new secret identities, powers and in some cases entirely new concepts? Yes.

And I have to call foul on the P.S. referring to “well-justified complaints” after a list of complaints that don’t have justifications, examples, or any room for counter-arguments. (Besides #2, #4 is unnecessarily absolutist–Sandman has been getting along fine for years collecting the short stories separately from the arc stories, thank you. #3 is self-justifying and can be used to justify any fan behavior, no matter how bad. #9 and #10 assume that everyone in the industry has to think the same way as the writer. And so forth.) An actual well-justified list is one thing; a rant is another; disguising one as the other and being disingenuous about it is quite another thing altogether.

I was certainly going for an ironic or sarcastic tone in general (I always have trouble telling those two things apart) — sorry if you felt it went downhill in the last few items. But as long as I was ranting and raving about things I can’t actually change, I figured I might as well not pull my punches . . .

It might amuse you to know that #9 and #10 were actually written long before some of the earlier material that you say you found more tolerable. I didn’t write those various “rights” in the same order in which I posted them. If anything, #10 was meant to laugh at myself as much as at anyone else, since I was basically admitting that while I may (pretty much) agree with the sentiments expressed in this silly Bill of Rights, I am keenly aware that I have no way to “enforce” them, so the entire piece is all pretty pointless except for any entertainment value it may have for my fellow diehard fans who share some of my pet peeves . . .

Jeff Holland — I actually know virtually nothing about the strengths or weaknesses of the Starman trades. I own a full run of the individual issues, instead. #4 was directly inspired by the ridiculous way DC has collected portions of Cassandra Cain’s “Batgirl” title — a point which I hinted at more strongly in #10, when I mentioned a bizarre hodge-podge of issues from the teens and twenties of that title been reprinted way out of sequence in the 3rd and 4th TPBs. The numbers I used were shamelessly copied from the way that was handled with poor Cassandra’s trades . . .

mikesensei — I bought the “Kingdom Come” mini as it came out. Never bought the trade. When I later read “The Kingdom,” I was a bit startled at the existence of the child of Kal-El and Diana . . . I think I later heard, online, about how the TPB had added various bells and whistles, but I’d forgotten any details of how the TPB was different until you told me (since I still haven’t read it). That does sound ridiculous, though.

Matthew E — I didn’t even consider the possibility of not getting one of the issues in the middle of a year-long subscription period. I blush to realize how naive and trusting I must still be. Apparently, when I started writing this “Bill of Rights” some months ago, I was feeling cynical — but not nearly cynical ENOUGH! Someday I will overcome this optimism that still infects my soul . . .

Several years ago I was in a used-book store. There was a TPB of “Maximum Carnage” available, cheap. I have a shameful confession to make: Not only did I buy it, but I then took it home and read it. Yes, ALL the way through. (By the time I finished, I certainly understood why the previous owner had been willing to trade it in at the store.)

So I know what you (and your brothers) suffered.

Jeff Holland

I have to agree that if I’d just bought Kingdom Come’s individual issues, I’d be pretty honked off by the trade – the added story pages are just fantastic.

I own all the individual issues of Starman, too, but thought I’d go for the collections, as they’re easier to break out on a whim and lend to friends. But the first two trades (which I just to catch up to the monthlies) omitted the early “Times Past” stories, which had to be reprinted out of order in a later all-TP trade. The Shade miniseries, which is pretty important for Grand Gugnol, hasn’t been collected yet, nor has the 80-Page Giant. Only the main “secret files” story was reprinted (the whole thing, particularly the timeline, is really illuminating). And I’m not sure if the romance-themed annual (one of my favorite parts) ever got collected. Which is a shame, because though the breaks could be frustrating on a monthly basis, when read in large chunks you can see that the TP and specials were very placed very specifically in the narrative.

As for the ‘Swamp Thing’ question, it’s obvious. Rule #11: If you’re Alan Moore, you get to do whatever you feel like, because you’re a genius.

Actually, I think a lot of these rules can be boiled down to, “You have a right to expect honesty from the people you’re giving money to. This doesn’t mean they have to tell you the truth when you ask, ‘Hey, is Captain America dead?’, but it does mean that they have to deal with you on an above-board basis. If they write a story, they don’t get to ignore it or retcon it away as soon as it becomes inconvenient. They don’t get to say, ‘This is our last crossover,’ then do another big crossover two years later and say, ‘We never said that was our last crossover.’ They can’t say, ‘Continuity isn’t important, we’re all about telling good stories’ when they get caught in a blatant continuity error, then demand that you buy ‘Countdown’. They must, fundamentally, stop relying on tricks, gimmicks, and flashy ‘nothing will ever be the same again!’ changes, and focus on telling good stories, or otherwise their readers will feel cheated, get jaded, lose interest, and walk away from the hobby.”

And, of course, rule #11: “We, as comic fans, have a right to a ‘Hawk and Dove’ series.”

Scott — To be perfectly frank, I’ve never been a big fan of Swamp Thing. Wasn’t even thinking about him when I wrote any of this — as near as I can recall. I think I’ve read two TPBs collecting some of Alan Moore’s run — one of them is the collection of his first few issues, including that bit about “you can’t kill a plant by shooting it in the head.” But given that I’ve probably only read, in my entire life, one or two other issues of ANY of the pre-Moore Swamp Thing appearances, I’m not in a good position to judge just how severe his retconning was.

Nor, for that matter, can I judge whether or not the first version of the origin story fell into the category of “a good solid origin story” I mentioned above, since I’ve never read the actual story! Just summaries of the basic idea.

(Although I’ve known for years that, apparently by an incredible coincidence, Swamp Thing and Man-Thing had similar origin stories when they debuted almost simultaneously at different companies, and the writers in question (Len Wein on Swamp Thing and Gerry Conway on Man-Thing) were roommates at the time they wrote those origin stories . . . but apparently they both swear they’d never even compared notes as they were working on those creations!)

Lynxara — yes, I can see we’ve noticed some of the same childish behavior patterns in online discussions of fans, and we have felt a similar lack of admiration for them. Near as I can recall: my explanation of the concept of “Free Speech” in #3 was at least partially triggered by something that happened last spring (maybe a couple of months before I wrote part of this and then set it aside for awhile).

I was on DC’s own boards. Fan Alpha (to invent a name) said something. Fan Beta said something in response that included some trace of irony or sarcasm — not expressed as a scathing personal attack, but at least meant to inject a note of humor into whatever was being discussed (I can’t remember the original topic). Fan Alpha said, very snippily, that it was totally inappropriate to use sarcasm in that fashion on these boards.

I was AMAZED at Fan Alpha’s arrogance in acting as if he were a self-appointed Maker of Rules of Conduct on DC’s Boards. He didn’t seem to have any formal authority (such as being an official moderator hired by DC), but he still seemed to feel he had the right to invent a “rule of etiquette” out of thin air, to suit his own taste, and to then lay down the law about what good and polite fans would or would not say in future conversations on those boards!

Some of us (including yours truly) responded to him rather critically, and others simply ignored him. I don’t recall a single case of anyone saying, “Fan Alpha, you have opened my eyes! Never again will I commit the terrible sin of offending people by using sarcasm on these boards!” (Frankly, if anyone had said that, I would have suspected him of being extremely sarcastic.)

My biggest problem, however, remains: No article saying â€œYou have the right to good comics.â€

Because you don’t. “Good comics” is ultimately a matter of personal taste. The person who loves Scott Pilgrim may loathe New Avengers, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people who love New Avengers and wonder what the hell is up with all those videogame references in the kiddie comic all the critics keep pimping.

Taste is subjective, so “good comics” is ultimately a shifting value. Except for Immortal Iron Fist. If you don’t like that, there really is something wrong with you.

avengers63

Believe me, dude, I totally understand the need to just rant for a while and get it all off your chest. It seemed to me that the first 2/3 were in the tone (agreed to be sarcastic, though legitimate gripes) of a somewhat serious set of tenants. After that, it just turned into an over the top sarcastic rant with no hint of clever disguise. I don’t have qualms about the backhanded message, but that the tone and cleverness was abandoned.

But aside from that, I’m in TOTAL agreement with you. You’d think these writers that keep doing stupid things like we’re always griping about… It’s like they’re not fans of the medium or of the characters.

Lucion

John Seavey summed up my current mood. I want honesty (even if I am too cynical to expect it). At the very least I don’t appreciate being treated like an idiot, particularly when I am paying for the privilege.

I would be pretty happy if I could just have #1 come true. I buy trades for the most part, but when I buy floppies I read reviews to find out if it is a self-contained story or at least part of a one-title story arc. I think it’s ridiculous that I have to do research to ensure I don’t become ensnared in Countdown to Planet Armageddon CompleX. Actually, I’d like to see a banner, similar to the Civil War/Countdown logo across the top of the book saying, “Not part of a company-wide crossover!” like Nextwave #11.

Jeff Holland, that makes me sad hearing about how messed up the Starman trades are. I have heard a lot of good things about the series and wanted to pick it up in trades sometime soon, but learning that they did such a poor job with it is dissapointing.

David Lynch

Whence do these “rights” originate? I don’t mean that in a philosophical sense. All of them but #3 (by the way they’re numbered in your post 1., 02., 03., etc, maybe that should be fixed) deal with the comics business, stuff that is controlled by the people making comics, and #3 sharply deviates from that by addressing fan message boards. Not only that, any “rights” one may have on said message boards are subject to the whims of the people who host, run, and maintain the board. If someone who runs a board wants to delete any posts that disparage Aquaman, they can totally do so. This is, in general, the problem with boards.

Same goes for this blog comment- if one of the people running CSBG decides they don’t like this comment and want to delete it, they can, and they’re within their rights to do so. I’m pretty confident they won’t, which is why I’m making this comment in the first place, but there is overall a centralized control, by _somebody_, for pretty much any comment on the Internet these days.

This one is in reaction to Doug Atkinson’s points in Comment #9 on this page.

Doug Atkinson said:
“And I have to call foul on the P.S. referring to â€œwell-justified complaintsâ€ after a list of complaints that donâ€™t have justifications, examples, or any room for counter-arguments.

Providing specific examples of pet peeves struck me as being contrary to the general purpose and appropriate tone of a “Bill of Rights” (even one that wasn’t meant to be taken completely seriously). The original Bill of Rights, comprising the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, did not mention any specific complaints of bad behavior on the part of the British government which the United States had just recently rebelled against. It’s my understanding that the painful memories of bad British behavior helped inspire the composition of at least some of the amendments in the Bill of Rights (maybe all ten of them, for all I know!), but rehashing those old arguments by spewing out fresh tirades of anti-British propaganda was never the mission statement of the Bill of Rights itself.

Or, to put it another way, I WASN’T trying to build up an airtight case against any particular writer, editor, etc. I wasn’t trying to recruit people for a vigilante mob to go track down and tar and feather one particular person in the industry. I was trying to make more general statements — statements triggered by various pet peeves, but I wasn’t trying to start rousing debates on the Pros and Cons of one particular writer’s story arcs on a Superman title, for instance. (If that were my mission statement, I’d simply do it that way on a Superman forum.)

Incidentally: Just in case it wasn’t clear on the first pass . . . the passage in which I briefly mentioned “well-justified complaints” did not say and was not meant to imply that EVERY complaint made by any modern comic book fan should automatically be considered a “well-justified” one.

Doug Atkinson also said:
“(Besides #2, #4 is unnecessarily absolutistâ€“Sandman has been getting along fine for years collecting the short stories separately from the arc stories, thank you. #3 is self-justifying and can be used to justify any fan behavior, no matter how bad. #9 and #10 assume that everyone in the industry has to think the same way as the writer. And so forth.)”

On your point about #4: I’ve only read a couple of TPB collections of Sandman arcs, many years ago, and decided the title really wasn’t my cup of tea. So I certainly can’t claim to be a certified expert on the details of what has been done right (or wrong) in its TPB reprints in general. However, looking back on it, I note that I specifically said, regarding my preferred reason for issues of a title to be collected in order:

“so that the internal continuity, with its gradual development of long-term subplots, etc., actually makes sense to anyone reading the TPBs as they are successively released.”

If Neil Gaiman’s shorter stories about Morpheus were carefully written to be as self-contained as possible, without spending a few pages at a time showing the slow development of little subplots in the background that would become central to the plots of other stories in the future, then he neatly AVOIDED the problem I refered to, but did it in a different way than the solution I was advocating. (And good for him, I say!)

On your point about #3: I simply don’t see it as justifying “any fan behavior, however bad.” That’s an incredibly sweeping statement. In #3, I was only talking about free speech in online forums — a venue wherein there’s no face-to-face contact, no risk of physical violence, etc. I wasn’t talking about (for instance) stalking people in real life, or being violent toward people who have aroused your ire, or stealing anybody’s property, or any of the other horror stories I’ve heard about the lunatic fringe of fandom . . .

On what you said about #9 and #10: Frankly, I don’t think I follow your meaning when you claim they both “assume that everyone in the industry has to think the same way as the writer.” Could you please elaborate a bit?

Doug Atkinson also said: “An actual well-justified list is one thing; a rant is another; disguising one as the other and being disingenuous about it is quite another thing altogether.”

Huh? “Disingenuous”? At the end I specifically CALLED my own silly list a “rant,” so where does “disingenuous” come in? I thought I was being quite candid about what I had just perpetrated!

Michael said:
“My biggest problem, however, remains: No article saying â€œYou have the right to good comics.â€”

Too vague for my purposes. I preferred to write about putative “rights” in reaction to a handful of much more specific pet peeves; cases where it’s much easier to gauge whether or not a “rule” is being “broken.”

I mean, you can point at any comic book you think is awful, and call it “bad,” and the creative team can just reply, straight-faced: “No, no, no! We worked hard to make it a GOOD comic! What a shame that YOU just don’t appreciate it properly!”

Or to put it another way: To make such a rule stick, you’d have to define exactly what makes a comic a “good” comic, and then get everybody else (or at least the overwhelming majority of all interested parties) to accept your definition exactly the way you had written it. (Good luck with that!)

DanCJ

Rule 1 I’m completely behind. If you subscribe to a comic you should get a complete reading experience (except of course for any issues that will be picked up by the next year’s subscription).

The rest, not so much. Basically other than rule 1 I don’t see why the publishers should do anything other than whatever they think makes the most business sense. That obviously is tempered through the fact that if they screw fans around too much, fans will stop buying their comics.